Comment by 1313ed01

8 hours ago

Martin Gardner wrote an article on platonic solids in Scientific American, December 1958, and mentioned this in passing: "All five Platonic solids have been used as dice. Next to the cube the octahedron seems to have been the most popular". I have no idea what games using 8-sided dice were somewhat popular (or existed at all) in 1958 or earlier? I wondered about that since I first read that article some decade ago.

I also read a book about games from ca 1880 and it described 12-sided dice (the usual one, numbered 1-12) as if that was a thing some people used for playing games, but none of the games described in that book used them and I also have no idea about other old games using 12-sided dice.

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1313ed01

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bombcar  7 hours ago

I've seen some octahedrons but they pale in comparison to the six siders - I suspect partially because it's hard to see an octahedron and assume it's fair. It looks like a parallelogram.

Besides gambling games most dice in antiquity were used in rituals or soothsaying.